Email this article “A place i’th’ story”. Narrative, meaning and identity in Antony and Cleopatra
Abstract
Antony and Cleopatra is one of several plays in the Shakespearean canon that evince a particularly acute interest in the role played by narrative in giving shape and significance to experience and contributing to the formation of individual identity. Not only does the drama situate itself within a matrix of pre-existent literary narratives which frequently diverge from one another in the interpretations they give to events, but the major characters within it tend to define themselves in relation to stories of mythological origin which are also often highly ambivalent in their implications. While dramatizing the mechanisms through which the various kinds of story in which the individual’s sense of self is vested are elaborated, Shakespeare’s play also illustrates some of the ways in which these narratives can come into collision with one another to the detriment of a selfhood constructed by such means.
References
Adelman J. 1973, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra”, Yale University Press, New Haven (CT).
Adelman J. 1992, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest”, Routledge, New York (NY).
Baldwin T.W. 1944, William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, University of Illinois Press, Urbana (IL).
Bloom H. 1999, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Fourth Estate, London.
Bono B.J. 1984, Literary Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy, University of California Press, Berkeley (CA).
Bruner J. 2004, Life as Narrative, in “Social Research” 71 (3), pp. 691-670.
Casali S. 2004/2005, Further Voices in Ovid “Heroides 7”, in “Hermathena” 177/178, pp. 147-164.
Chaucer G. 1969, Complete Works. Ed. Walter W. Skeat. London: Oxford University Press.
Davies M. 2013, The Hero at the Crossroads: Prodicus and the Choice of Heracles, in “Prometheus: Rivista di studi classici” 39, pp. 3-17.
Deats S.M. 2005, Shakespeare’s Anamorphic Drama: A Survey of “Antony and Cleopatra” in Criticism, on Stage, and on Screen, in Deats S.M. (ed.) Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, Routledge, New York (NY) and London, pp. 1-93.
DeForest M.M. 1989, The Central Similes of Horace’s Cleopatra Ode, in “The Classical World” 82 (3), pp. 167-173.
Findlay, A. 2010, Women in Shakespeare: A Dictionary, Continuum, London.
Grummel W.C. 1954, The Cleopatra Ode, in “The Classical Journal” 49 (8), pp. 359-361.
Hannay M.P., Kinnamon N.J. and Brennan G. 1998, Introduction, in Hannay M.P., Kinnamon N.J. and Brennan G. (eds.), The Collected Work of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. I, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 1-77.
Hillman R. 1987, Antony, Hercules, and Cleopatra: “the bidding of the gods” and “the subtlest maze of all”, in “Shakespeare Quarterly” 38, pp. 442-451.
Horace 2000, The Complete Odes and Epodes, trans. David West, rpt. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Lange, C.H. 2009, Res Publica Constituta: Actium, Apollo and the Accomplishment of the Triumviral Assignment, Brill, Leiden and Boston (MA).
Lloyd M. 2002, Cleopatra as Isis, in “Shakespeare Survey” 12, rpt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 88-94.
Lucking D. 2012, Making Sense in Shakespeare, Rodopi, Amsterdam.
Martindale C. 2009, Introduction, in Martindale C. and Hopkins D. (eds), Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1-26.
McAdams D.P. and McLean K.C. 2013, Narrative Identity, in “Current Directions in Psychological Science” 22, pp. 233-238.
Miola R. 2004, Shakespeare’s Rome, rpt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ovid 1914, Heroides and Amores, trans. Showerman G., Heinemann/Macmillan, London and New York.
Plutarch 1579, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines, trans. North T., printed by Richard Field, London.
Plutarch 1603, The Philosophie, Commonlie Called, the Morals, trans. Holland P., printed by S.G. for J. Kirton, London.
Shakespeare W. 2018, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Wilders J., rpt. Bloomsbury, London.
Shakespeare W. 2001, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds. Proudfoot R., Thompson A. and Kastan D.S., rpt. Thomson Learning, London.
Shickman A. 1978, The “Perspective Glass” in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, in “Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900” 18, pp. 217-228.
Singer J.A. 2004, Narrative Identity and Meaning-Making across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, in “Journal of Personality” 72, pp. 437-459.
Virgil 1999, Virgil I: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, trans. Fairclough H.R., Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) and London.
Virgil 2000, Virgil I:, Aeneid VII-XII, Appendix Vergiliana, trans. Fairclough H.R., Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) and London.
Wilders J. 2018, Introduction, in the Arden Shakespeare Edition of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Wilders J., rpt. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 1-84.
Westbrook P.D. 1947, Horace’s Influence on Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”, in “PMLA” 62 (2), pp. 392-398.
White H. 1980, The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality, in “Critical Inquiry” 7, pp. 5-27.
Full Text: pdf
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
